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WEB EXCLUSIVE: Doing Fine in Detroit

Randall Fine’s consulting firm, Las Vegas-based Fine Point Group, is charged with turning around the fortunes of the financially troubled Greektown Casino in Detroit. In an online exclusive, he gives an update on the property that is showing improvement following bankruptcy filing last year

Randall Fine is
founder and managing director of the Fine Point Group, a gaming and hospitality
consulting firm based in Las Vegas.
His prior gaming experience includes executive roles at Harrah’s Entertainment,
where he served as vice president of Total Rewards and product marketing and as
vice president of slots and Total Rewards Operations, and with Carl Icahn’s
casino company, where he helped position those properties for sale at a $1
billion profit. Since founding the Fine Point Group in 2005, Fine has grown the
firm from a one-man shop to a 15-person team of senior-level consultants,
serving more than 100 properties around the world. Fine spoke with Casino
Journal Managing Editor Marian Green in late March, focusing on one of the
firm’s newest clients, Detroit’s
Greektown Casino, and efforts to reinvigorate the property following its May
2008 bankruptcy filing.

What projects are you working on right now? Obviously Greektown is a
big one.

Fine:
We serve clients that generate about $5 billion in gross gaming revenues, and
we don’t typically share our client list, because when we help them we want
them to be the ones that get the glory for the work that we do. Sometimes they tell
people that we work with them, sometimes they don’t. Greektown, obviously, is
public, given the bankrupt situation. But we work with one of the largest
locals operators in Las Vegas.
We work with the largest Native American gaming company. We work with the
largest Pennsylvania
gaming operator. We work with a number of the riverboat gaming companies. We
work with Native American tribes on the West Coast. We’ve done work in Canada, in the Caribbean, Asia, Eastern Europe
and Western Europe. So we’ve worked all over.

You’ve come a long way in a short time.

I think it was because there was a
market need. I felt there would be a value to the industry of a group of folks
who really were from the industry, not who consulted to the industry, not who
just watched the industry, but people who actually worked in the industry who
could leverage their expertise to help other companies improve their
operations. Our executives have worked at Harrah’s, MGM Mirage, Station, Boyd,
Isle of Capri, Colony Capital –so we all have the sense for what our clients’
challenges are because we’ve dealt with those challenges ourselves. That’s part
of why we’ve grown. Folks know that when they hire us, they’re going to get results.

In the case of Greektown, that must have
gone a long way.

Greektown approached us. They invited us
to pitch. I think there were a lot of other groups that were interested in that
project, but they chose us because they said they saw we had a proven track
record of optimizing existing assets. There are a lot of folks in this business
that if you want them to do anything, they hold out their hand for a check to
build something. Their answer to everything is renovations and building and
capital. And our answer is smart operations, smart marketing and leveraging
what we have. We don’t sit around and complain about what we don’t have. We
take what we have and make it work as best we can. And I think that was pretty
resonant in the Greektown decision.

Talk about some of your initial steps to
turn around Greektown. What did you do first?

We’ve been at Greektown for a little
more than two months [at the time of this interview], and we’ve launched a top
to bottom analysis of everything at the property. So we have retooled every
aspect of their marketing program, from branding, to database, to players club
to player development, events and promotions the entire thing soup to nuts.
We’ve taken a look at the positioning of the property and staked out a position
that we’re comfortable with. We’re telling customers we’re the place we’re going
to provide the best value for their dollar. We feel that’s a position we can
own in the market. From the operations side, we’re looking for every opportunity
to cut costs intelligently without demonstrably hurting customer service, and
sometimes improving it, and so there’s been a lot of opportunity to take
expense out of the business.

What
was the positioning of Greektown before? Where did they go wrong?

Well, they went wrong a little bit in
trying to compete with the MGM Grands of the world on MGM Grand’s playing
field. MGM Grand spent a billion dollars building an entirely new property.
Greektown spent a few hundred million adding on to their existing temporary
facility and said, “How can we be like MGM?” And that’s a losing proposition.
We’ve said for the customers who want $15 hamburgers, MGM are the place for
them to go. We don’t want to try to one-up them in the
who-has-the-most–expensive-luxury-items fight. We want to focus on Middle America, average working folks who want to have a
great time at a great price. So we have shifted the focus of the property away
from competing for this ethereal luxury customer to the more value-oriented regular
person.

How about working with the staff – how do
you gain their trust or motivate them?

Well, we’ve motivated them in large part just by
communicating with them. We’ve had meetings; we’ve had rallies with all the staff
where they can see us, where they can talk to us, where they can ask us
questions. We’ve let them know that if they reach out to us with questions and
complaints, we’ll respond to their issues. We have given them a sense that we
want to win, that we want this property to succeed, not fail. And we’ve started
to have some wins, and it creates a self-supporting cycle where people start to
get enthusiastic. We’re really happy with the way things are going.

Can you describe some of your successes to
date?

We grew market share in February over
January pretty dramatically [from 22.8 percent share to 23.5 percent], the only
property in the market to do so. We’re hoping to do it again this month [March].
[Greektown did improve its market share, growing to 25 percent market share,
1.5 percent over February’s 23.5 percent market share. The casino continued to
perform well in April, up another .7 percent] We are going to beat our EBITDA
plan for the first quarter by 80 percent. You’d probably be hard-pressed to
find a casino in the United
States that’s going to beat their plan by 80
percent. And we’re giving people a vision of where we want this property to go.
Enthusiasm is contagious, and when people see how enthusiastic we are and how
excited we are about the potential of this property, it’s really impossible to
not get on board that train. And to be honest, anybody who has been content
with the performance of the past is being told that there won’t be a home for
them at Greektown. We’re looking for people who want to win, who are willing to
claw and scratch and do whatever they have to do to be successful.

What is the real potential of Greektown and
why hasn’t it been realized?

I think that the property had a fair
number of leadership challenges. It was managed by committee of folks who with
house and hundreds of miles away. And you just can’t run a casino that way. You
have to have people on site, enmeshed in the business, sweating the numbers 24
hours a day, seven days a week. I think that was a big part of it, and we’ve
remedied that. We have a team on the ground there every day who is working the
business all hours of the day and night to move the needle as quickly as we
can.

What do you see as the potential in that
market for a property like Greektown?

The property has recently been doing low
20s -- 21, 22, 23 -- percent market share, and we want to get that number up toward
30 percent. We think that’s doable, profitably by the way.

Are you seeing customers not venturing over
to Caesars Windsor
as much?

That’s been the case for a long time. We
plan to be very focused on letting customers know that when they take their
business to Canada, when
they go across the border, they’re not creating jobs in the United States, they’re not creating jobs in Michigan, they’re not creating jobs in Detroit,
they’re not creating taxes for the state of Michigan
and the city of Detroit.
And these are things that that state and that community really could use. We
clearly intend to be making that message loud and clear on how we can keep
those dollars here where we can benefit our own.

We’re
in such a severely challenged market and Detroit
probably more so than a lot of places. So what’s the potential for growing
market share when people don’t have jobs and the auto industry is turmoil?

Detroit
has been a recession for 10 years, so the rest of us are learning to live in a
recession not the other way around. Things don’t really seem to be that much
different in Detroit
than they have been. Even though the market has been in effect a recession for
10 years, gaming has continued to grow, and it’s pretty stable. We can grow
market share because that’s just our slice of the pie. In terms of how big the
pie is, we just have to focus on [the fact that] people still are going to want
entertainment. They need an escape from all of the stress, and we want to say
to folks that when you take that 20 dollars or 30 dollars or 50 dollars and go
out to have a good time, we’re going to give you more entertainment value for
that dollar than anybody else. That’s what our focus is all about.

So that value proposition resonates right
now?

I think the value proposition is
custom-made for these economic times. I think the industry got convinced that
there was this limited supply of people who wanted to pay $15 for a hamburger,
$150 for a spa treatment, $1,500 for a bottle of booze and a million and a half
dollars for a condominium. And I don’t know where they thought these people
were going to come from. We never believed in it; it doesn’t exist. People are
looking for value, and the operators who are going to win are those who are
going to provide people with a great time for their money.

Events

The spread of COVID-19 has compelled all casinos to rewrite their 2020 playbook. In this high-level panel you will hear how casino marketers can kick-start and rebuild customer relationships now that the post-closure phase is underway. Specific issues to be covered will include what your near-term customer re-engagement plan should look like, how relationship management and loyalty programs that were impacted by the shutdown can be retooled, and some rules of the road for casino marketers as we point toward the second half of the year.

How long do you think it will take the gaming industry to economically recover from the COVID-19 pandemic and government-mandated closings?

In this issue of Casino Journal, The gaming industry responds to the social and economic onslaught of COVID-19, Developing a Coronavirus Protection Strategy for Casinos and Cardroom, A New Way to Build Casino Loyalty during Coronavirus, and much more!

In this issue of Sports Betting Management, read how more and more Native American properties establish sportsbooks or strike marketing deals with professional teams and leagues, The National Football League (NFL) continues to have an impact on sports betting within the U.S., and much more!